I can run the CameraPreview demo and see that the camera portion only takes the first half of the screen.
What I would like to do is add buttons to the bottom half of the screen, so that the user can just press the button to snap a pic, change settings, etc.

I've played with the different layouts and know how to add buttons, checkbox, radiobuttons on them, but what I'm having trouble with is the CameraPreview demo does not use the xml files where I've usually added these widgets.
Instead it creates a SurfacesView and sets the content to this.